Sermon On The Mount: Love Your Enemies

Hello, my name is Eric Seegan, and I am one of the pastors at the Village Church.

The following podcast is a ministry of the Village Church.

We hope that it inspires you, that it draws you closer to Jesus, and it opens your eyes to the possibilities of living in the kingdom.

Enjoy and God bless.

Let's pray.

Jesus, thank you for today.

Thank you for the joy that it is to be here together.

As we listen to one another, as we eat.

In your name I pray.

Amen.

Amen.

Alright, so you'll have your three by five card, get a pen, we'll get to it.

We are um in a series on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter five through seven.

And today is a little bit of a part two from last week's sermon.

Last week we talked about Jesus as the fulfillment of the law.

And we talked about how the understanding of that truth impacts how we understand his teaching on the law.

Right?

So if he is the fulfillment of the law and then he teaches on the law, then we have to understand it in that order that he is the fulfillment and then understand his teaching through that lens.

We talked about uh confessing anger and lust and doing the hard work of covenant relationship.

We talked about speaking truth and walking in vulnerability.

Thank you, sir.

Today, today we're gonna wrap up Jesus' teaching on the law by talking about loving our enemies.

Before we jump into our passage today, we're gonna reflect on the phrase that I repeated a lot last week, which is that we are the blessed, thankful kingdom of heaven, people of God.

First, we are blessed.

The crowd that came to Jesus at the mountain to listen to him speak was a giant mix of people: sick, lost, hopeful, revolutionary, skeptics, skeptical, teachers of the law, and marginalized sinners sitting side by side.

And there on the mountain, Jesus proclaimed who the people of God are.

But he didn't give a people group like the Jews, he didn't pass around a sign-up sheet to join his revolution.

Rather, he gave a list of qualities, the beatitudes, like poor and meek, persecuted and merciful.

Those who live out these qualities are those in God's favor, those to whom God is drawing near to give relief.

When we live out the beatitudes, the poor, the meek, the persecuted, the merciful, the pure in heart, we are living out the attributes of the people of God.

And second, we are thankful.

We are thankful because of the work of Jesus to remove the barrier of sin to our relationship with God.

We have been saved from the death of sin and brought into restored relationship with God.

Paul says in Colossians, he says, Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil, evil behavior.

But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight without blemish and free from accusation.

Everything we do as followers of Jesus is in thankfulness for what he has done.

Third, we are a kingdom people.

Out of that thankfulness, we live in the kingdom of heaven on earth.

This means we live in the imitation of Christ, in the way that he lived.

It means that we are called to live according to kingdom values, aligning ourselves with the king, Jesus, rather than with the values of this world.

Sometimes living in the kingdom will mean living in what the world might call foolishness, risking loss or danger or persecution in the name of the king and his love and mission.

Consider for a moment the beginning of this passage, which says, You have heard that it was said, but I tell you, which was repeated five times last week, or at least something very similar to that.

And I kind of skimmed over it last week.

But if you pause for a moment on that, you have heard that it was said, but I tell you, Jesus is offering us a choice.

He has offered us anger or reconciliation, lust or faithfulness, covenant work or divorce, oaths or simple truths, simple honesty, revenge or vulnerability.

These choices are not one-time choices or even occasional choices, they are daily hourly, moment-to-moment choices.

He offers us in this passage the world or the kingdom as an opportunity to live as he does.

It is in the big decision to follow Jesus that we are invited into the little decisions, the regular setting aside of the values of the world and choosing habits that will build in us the values of the kingdom.

We're going to live these out differently.

We live them out differently in our different contexts, right?

But these qualities, the blessed, thankful, kingdom of heaven qualities, are what identify us as the people of God.

With that in mind, we'll jump into our passage.

Matthew chapter five, verses forty-three to forty-eight.

You have heard that it was said, Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

He causes his son to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?

Are not even the tax collectors doing that?

And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others?

Do not even pagans do that.

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

So here is our option that Jesus offers us to hate our enemy or to love our enemy.

To hate someone is to kill them in your heart.

This is not simple anger.

I can be angry with you, I can have things to work out in relationship with you.

I can have even for a long season, though if we listened to Jesus last week, we'll work things out quickly, right?

But even in anger, I can still love you.

But hate is derived from long or intense, unresolved anger.

It is depersonalizing and corrosive.

We cannot hold on to hate in our hearts without it beginning to corrode our souls.

So who's the enemy of the first century Jew?

The Romans.

Yeah, primarily it's the Romans.

The Romans.

Caesar, the emperor in Rome, ruled over Judea in three primary ways.

The first was the force of the Roman army.

The number of soldiers in Judea at this time has diminished some, but the memory of their power is there.

It is very present.

Not even a hundred years before, General Pompey had walked into Jerusalem and desecrated the whole the temple.

He'd walked into the Holy of Holies, where only the high priest is supposed to go.

And second, stemming from that desecration was the regional king, Herod, king in air quotes.

He wasn't even fully Jewish, the king of the Jews.

King Herod, who served at the will of the emperor.

And then third were the tax collectors, Jewish men who had agreed to take from their own people in the name of the Romans.

So we have this amalgamated enemy, right?

A mix of the soldiers and Herod and the tax collectors all together reflecting the face of the emperor in Rome.

So you can imagine, just imagine with me for a moment, the frustration and the surprise of the Jewish leaders that one of Jesus' own disciples is a tax collector.

He also, Jesus multiple on multiple occasions, refuses to condemn Herod.

And maybe most shockingly, he says of a Roman centurion, so like a leader of the Roman soldiers, truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.

You see, the result of this hate for your enemy, for the Romans, the result of that hate is an insular community that is either revolutionary in its dreams of throwing off the Romans or isolating in its fear of upsetting the status quo or losing benefits.

Either way, it looks something like this.

We have these tiers of community from inside to outside, these broken relationships, right?

So it looks something like this.

We have the Jews and then the Yahweh followers.

There were people who followed God who weren't fully Jewish, but they they honored God.

And then you've got like the general populace, all the people out there.

And then you've got this like big jump, right?

So those are the people that you're kind of, I guess we could be in relationship, right?

From closer to a little farther out, and then you've got this big jump over here to tax collectors who were Jewish, but on the outside, and Romans, like the Roman soldiers, and then as that big representative person out there, Caesar, the emperor.

Who am I willing, even willing to be in relationship with?

Who are the Jews even willing to be in relationship with?

Right?

There's these chasms that are unjumpable, right?

You cannot get across them and even begin relationship there.

Who is your enemy?

Who's your enemy?

To be persecuted is is in the sense like to pray for those who persecute you, right?

To be persecuted is to be chased, to be constantly poked and pushed down, questioned, undermined, abused, to have someone chase after you.

Take a moment.

You got your three by five card there in front of you, right?

Take a moment with your three by five card.

And I want you to listen to these categories.

I'm gonna read some categories, and then I want you to write down at least one name.

You can write down more.

Maybe write down one for each category.

If you, you know, maybe you've got a lot of enemies and you're just all ready to write them down.

But write down at least one name.

And I know for some of us this exercise may be hard because we don't want to think that we have enemies.

But Jesus says we do.

So let's name them.

Let's name them because unless we can name them, we can't step into what comes next.

So I'm gonna read some categories, hold your three by five cards, and write down at least one name.

So first, consider your old stories, okay?

Your old stories, your childhood stories, right?

Neighborhood bullies, classmates, teammates, teachers who antagonized you, parents who neglected you or abused you, extended family or family friends.

For me, it's the boy in in first grade, the boy who pushed past me in the line and said, No cuts.

You're not my friend anymore.

And then proceeded to alienate all of the other boys from being my friend also.

I remember sitting in class afterwards and having another boy come up to me and says, He says I can't be your friend anymore.

Consider your personal stories, your your present personal stories.

Some of those categories may still be present, right?

Your your family, teachers, classmates, but maybe now it's coworkers or bosses.

Maybe it's the guy who cuts you off on the way to work every day.

Every day.

That person.

So your old stories, your present personal stories.

And then I want you to consider for a moment the big systemic stories.

These are the things that divide us in culture, even as Christians.

Things like the president or political parties or movements, things like Black Lives Matter or Turning Point or Artificial Intelligence, Muslims, immigrants, the nation of Israel or Palestine.

The problem here is that we have these big systemic issues, and we choose a side, and it divides us as a culture, and we make enemies of people just because they have a different view than us.

We make enemies of people who we've never even met before.

Before they even walk in the room, we have named them as our enemy.

The old stories, the present stories, the big systemic stories.

Write a name if you haven't yet.

See the the result of this hate is again these insular communities that allow us to engage with people in these broken tiers of relationship or allow us to not engage with them.

So for politics, it might look a little like this.

I've got my friends, and I've got Christians who agree with me, and then my political party.

And then out there are the Christians who don't agree with me, and they're a little bit better than the other political party.

And then you've got that big representative leader, whoever that is, out there.

And we create these big giant chasms, right?

How could that person believe that thing?

They're way out there.

I cannot, I've made an enemy of them before they even walk in the room.

For a long time, I sat in contempt for a coworker who was cruel to me.

At least that's the way I perceived it.

She was it was miserable to work with her.

She was my sips shift supervisor at Starbucks.

And the only reason that I could think that she didn't like me was because I was a Christian.

A while later, I decided that maybe at least part of it was also that she thought I wasn't a very good worker.

But mostly the Christian thing.

No, but she was my enemy.

I dreaded going to work when she was there.

I remember calling out several times because I knew that she was going to be the shift supervisor.

So for me, at work, it looked a little bit like this.

Right?

My friends, Keith and Brian.

And then there were like friendly co-workers, people who I enjoyed working with, and then the customers, right?

Just the customers who came in.

I really liked all my customers.

It was like my favorite part about working at Starbucks.

And then there's other co-workers who I didn't like as much.

And a disinterested boss who couldn't care less that I dreaded coming into work.

And then this persecuting co-worker.

You see, the contempt that I had for the one coworker impacted how I saw all my coworkers and my boss.

The hate that I had for my enemy impacted not just me and my relationship with this person, but the entire system.

The result was a general distrust and suspicion of everyone who is not outrightly friendly of me.

There are natural tiers of friendship, right?

There's natural layers of friendship because we can only have so many close relationships, right?

We can't be intimate, best friends with every person on earth.

But when we write off people because of fear, hate, contempt, when we make them our enemies, we end up with these unnatural, broken tears where we have these chasms that you cannot jump across.

Consider your person that you wrote down.

Take a look at your card again.

What makes them an enemy?

How do they change how you see other people around you?

So Jesus predictably turns us around and offers us a choice.

The amazing thing with all of these choices, going back to last week, is that is how often.

Often we feel like we just don't have a choice.

Right?

Jesus says, But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

Can you imagine sitting in uh on the mountain at that moment with all the Jews?

And here's Jesus, he says, Pray for those who persecute you, love your enemies.

This is the person who is the Messiah.

The one who's going to take the throne of David.

He's supposed to establish the throne forever.

Doesn't that mean casting off the Romans?

How is loving the Romans going to get rid of them?

How is loving them going to achieve the forever throne?

He must be here to defeat the soldiers, to cast down the false king and punish the betraying tax collectors.

How am I supposed to love my enemies when they are, well, my enemies?

This isn't the first time God has said something like this, though, to Israel.

When the Israelites are carried off into exile, right, in the Old Testament, Babylon comes in and carries Israel off to exile.

Men, women, and children are killed.

The temple of Solomon is burned, and the walls are thrown down, and the people despair.

And you can hear it in their songs.

You can read it in the Psalms, a people powerless to do anything, rage at God, crying out for vengeance, for the children of Babylon to be bashed against the rocks.

False prophets come.

False prophets come and they say, Ah, it's okay.

Don't worry about it.

Two years.

Two years, and we'll be back in Jerusalem.

Jeremiah comes, he says, No, it's gonna be 70 years.

70 years is a significant amount of time, right?

70 years is a generation.

It is Jeremiah, it's not just like a, you know, there's there's they go back in about 70 years.

But 70 years is not saying like, oh, in 70 years we will go back.

It is 70 years is you will die here.

You are not going back.

Build houses and settle down, Jeremiah says.

Plant gardens and eat what they produce, marry and have sons and daughters, find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters.

Increase in number there, do not decrease.

Seek the prosperity, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.

Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.

Pray to the Lord.

Pray to the Lord for the good of the city of your captors and destroyers, the people who burned the temple.

Pray for the good of the city.

Seek the peace and the prosperity of the city.

What is that?

But love for your enemy.

We face the same choice.

We face the same choice.

For us in the United States, the stakes are not quite the same.

But I tell you the truth, if we choose to be insular, to divide ourselves from the world, to divide ourselves from fellow believers, to hate our enemies, we will fade as though in exile in Babylon.

Jesus' kingdom is one of action.

Love is active.

It is a verb.

To be a blessed, thankful kingdom of heaven, people of God, is to begin to have difficult conversations with God about our enemies and our hardened hearts.

To confess that there are people who we avoid because they have hurt us, people we have killed in our hearts before we have even met them because they are different.

There's a sense in which forgiveness is healing for ourselves, you know, in the world's understanding of healing, right?

Where there is forgiveness, there is less stress, anger, anxiety.

It is literally good for your body to forgive.

But that's not all we're talking about here.

To love your enemy is to put yourself in the place of service, of serving them.

Jesus did not simply forgive us, he loved us by serving us, by laying down his life while we were still in sin, enemies in our mind, waiting to be redeemed.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, love is the binding of wounds and the provision of care.

It's active.

We love our enemies through prayer.

We love our enemies by serving them as we are able.

I want to pause for a moment.

I want to pause here for a moment to acknowledge pain, long sorrow.

To acknowledge the bearing up under an enemy.

To remind us that we cannot do this without God.

In our power and our love, we cannot love our enemies.

I'm gonna pause and I want to read a psalm that speaks at least what I feel when I think about some of these things.

I think speaks encouragement to us as we consider loving our enemies.

How long, Lord?

Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?

How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Look on me and answer, Lord my God, give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, and my enemy will say I have overcome him, and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

But I trust in your unfailing love.

My heart rejoices in your salvation.

I will sing the Lord's praise, for he has been good to me.

What then is the purpose of all this?

What's the purpose?

Is it simply to place ourselves under our enemies?

To turn the other cheek because we can't do anything anyway.

There's a bit of defeatism that sneaks in sometimes when we think in this way.

But no.

No, the purpose is in the rest of what Jesus says in this passage.

First, he says, uh, pray for those who persecute you, right?

That you may be children of your father in heaven.

That is to say, that you may be like him as a son is like his father, or a daughter is like her mother.

Think about the faces you make, the gestures and the mannerisms, the little phrases that sneak in that make you shudder slightly and think, sound just like my parents.

When you love your enemies, you are imitating the mannerisms of the Father.

The mannerisms of our Father in heaven who makes it rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

Second, he says, If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?

Even the tax collectors do that.

Essentially saying, You're no better than your enemy.

But Jesus does promise a reward in heaven when we are persecuted back in the Beatitudes.

This reward, it's not like a prize.

It's not the ice cream I promised my kids if they listen to my dad on Friday.

It's not a winning lottery ticket.

Right?

Reward here is closer to wages.

It is the result of your labor.

So maybe it's a little bit like the ice cream I promised my kids.

But we may not ever see the results of our labor.

We may not see the reward for our labor until we see it in heaven.

Third, he says, Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.

So I'd like to read a quote, something I listened to recently.

It says, We cannot live perfect lives, and striving to do so creates only division and more sin.

That was me.

I said that last week.

Yeah.

So when we think about perfect, we think about performance.

Right?

When I think about perfect, I think about I think about Nadia Comenecci in the 1976 Olympics.

Anyone?

How many of you have heard of Nadia Komenecci?

Oh, yeah.

All right.

Right?

Nadia Komenecci went to the 1976 Olympics as a gymnast and scored the first perfect 10 in Olympics history.

The scoreboard producer manufacturer didn't know that you could get a 10.

So when they displayed her score, it said 1.00.

I also think about the frisbee I got for getting a perfect score on my science final in seventh grade.

The frisbee that I totally forgot about until I found it in a friend's bin.

My mom had given it away.

This is what I think of.

When I think of perfect, I think of that.

It's scores, it's tests, it's sports, it's performance.

But that's not really what this means.

Seeking that goal of perfection does lead to division and sin.

This is closer to completeness or wholeness.

When we live out the law as Jesus has offered it to us over the last two weeks, then we will grow into wholeness as the Father in heaven is whole.

It's not about perfect scores, but rather about growing into spiritually mature followers of Jesus.

So what do we do?

What do we do then?

We live as a blessed, thankful kingdom of heaven, people of God.

We fix our eyes on Jesus and we make level paths, right?

Our lens for this series to fix our eyes on Jesus and make level paths.

So here's what it looks like when it comes to loving our enemies.

So I invite you to take your three by five card again and take a look at it.

This is what this looks like.

Listen.

First, listen.

Listen with compassion and grace.

Listen for hopes and fears and common ground.

When possible, if you look at your card, when possible, literally listen to your enemy for the story that they are telling, but especially listen to the Holy Spirit.

Listen for the narrative that you are telling and ask the Holy Spirit to refine it or just strip it away entirely.

Listen for your own judgment and standards, for the story that Jesus is telling about your enemy.

Second, pray for them.

Easiest sermon application ever.

It's literally in the text.

Jesus says, pray for those who persecute you.

Pray for your enemy.

Pray for their good, for their walk with Jesus, or for them to know Jesus.

Pray for their families, their jobs, their homes.

Pray in confession for the plank in your own eye.

Pray for the ways you may have sinned against your enemy, even if it's just confessing the hate that you hold in your heart.

Third, act in love.

Act in love towards them.

When possible, literally do good for your enemy.

Serve them in kindness.

This may be as simple as just holding your tongue in the break room.

But if you work through those first two, right, if you're listening to the Holy Spirit and you're praying and you're submitting all these things to Jesus, right, God's gonna give you other ways.

He's gonna offer you the opportunity to step in and to love your enemy.

To act in love towards them.

And before I open it up for questions, I want you to look at the name you wrote.

Maybe it's uh Fred from third grade.

Maybe it's a political leader or the lady from HR.

We're gonna pray for them.

I'm gonna leave a minute or so of silence, and I just want you to spend some time praying.

Confess your anger or your fear towards them.

Ask Jesus to help you love them.

Listen to his story.

Let's go to God in prayer.

You know them better than we ever could.

You are our refuge.

We acknowledge that you send rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

Jesus, we confess our anger towards our enemies.

The narratives we have written and our own actions against them.

We confess that you loved us even when we were still enemies by laying down your life for us.

Holy Spirit, give us the courage to love our enemies.

Bring us peace in our anxiety and comfort in our fear.

Reveal to us your heart for our enemies and give us compassion for them.

Amen.

I have a couple minutes.

Not too long.

I got a couple minutes.

Emily.

I was really I feel like there's a story I had from a friend that just really helped me with this concept a lot of loving your enemies and broke me out of like the idea that I know what that's gonna look like in the end.

That you know, is it does it automatically that you know we have to become besties or else the story doesn't end properly?

And uh anyway, she was it was a coworker doing bad things.

And then she out and she kept praying, you know, against this person, like just leave God, please just bundle them up, you know, help them not to have these bad effects on people.

And uh God at one point said, I want you to start praying for blessings for this person, and she's like, Are you kidding me?

They're your enemy too.

See how they she's acting like it's your enemy too, and God was like, No, blessings.

So she started playing praying blessings.

And after two years of praying against this person, six months after praying blessings, the person got an awesome job offer elsewhere and left the company.

What a blessing.

It's great.

Oh man.

So when you say um the last part of the verse where he says, like, be perfect as my heavenly father is perfect, could another way to think of that is just like essentially like be consistent as your heavenly father is consistent, as he says, he brings the rain on both the good and evil.

And like what we do is like you say, create these tiers of community where we're treating people differently based on like how we view our standing with them.

But God, regardless of that standing, treats everyone the same, essentially.

Like, um, so yeah, is it is it more of like a consistency, like a wholeness in thought, a wholeness in action where there's not a like differential treatment based on things.

We're not creating a separate reality in our mind of what that person is.

It's just they're a person made in the image of God, and I'm going to treat them as a person made in the image of God.

Yeah, I I thought a lot about how to how to talk about that word um more than I really needed to, to be honest.

Uh at least partly because last week I said that.

That no, we're not looking to be, we're not looking for that goal of perfection.

And then he says, be perfect.

Um, which I knew was coming, but uh one of the pictures that I that I had is this sort of is like uh in in uh like space when you're trying to make a good latch, when you're trying to make a good seal, like meet the space station, right?

And so you're coming in and being perfect is making that good seal with the father, like being close to him.

But along the way, as we're orienting ourselves towards that hatch, we're making all these little minor adjustments along the way to orient ourselves to make sure we're spinning in the right direction, to make sure that we're gonna line up in the right way so that we can make that good latch.

Um, I also thought about uh Robin Hood when he like shoots in the Disney one when he shoots his arrow and it goes way up in the air.

So he shoots another one and it hits it and gives it this course correction down towards.

There's this like orienting ourselves in the direction of the father so that we are growing to be more like the father in how he sees the people around us and how he sees his creation, so that we can act in orienting ourselves towards the father, then we can act in love towards the people around us.

Daniel and Karen, and then I think I need to pray.

So I'm just thinking about like people who are in bad situations with other people where there's abuse or where there is I don't know, a mistreatment, and this kind of verse might make them think, oh, I'm supposed to love my enemy and stay in this position.

And I think in the church, we often especially maybe women have like feel like they need to stay in bad situations or around, I don't know.

They're just that and they're like, I'm loving them, I'm I'm being a good Christian, and so I'm just hoping you can maybe speak to that.

Yeah, last week I think it applies in in a similar way to this, but when we talked about divorce, um, and it says except for marital and except for uh sexual infidelity, like you know, you um you make them an adulterer.

And it's not a license um to just send everyone send everyone away, right?

It's not uh it's not saying like, hey, you have to stay in this abusive relationship, it's actually a condemnation of these, it's and it's specifically oriented towards the men of the first century who had the power to just send their spouses away.

And so we take that often and say, no, no, no, you have to stay in your marriage, you have to stay in this place, in this abusive space.

And we can talk about like different ways that that looks what what that looks like in different contexts, but it's not a license to just say, no, you have to stay in in your abusive situation.

I know, but maybe other people don't.

That's why I'm at wanting us to talk about it because it's just if it doesn't get talked about in the midst of a sermon like this, people can come away with the wrong idea.

Well, it and we also do we end up in places where we are stuck for whatever reason in a place where we are being abused, whether it's because we have parents who are abusing us or because we need this job, like there is no other job, and my boss is terrible to me.

Like, we end up in these places, less so here in the United States, but it's still here, and this passage is not saying stay there in that abusive place, but when you have to be in that space, your defender is Jesus, and your reward is in heaven, there is a future hope for what is coming in Jesus.

And so no, it's not a a call to stay in abusive situations, but when we're in those places, it's an invitation to not be corroded by that hate.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Karen, and then I gotta pray.

Okay, so just a couple comments before you started talking about like the spacecraft thing.

My mind was already kind of thinking like, don't be leaky, but that sounds weird.

So be so when we don't forgive, we um we lose our structural integrity, like our spiritual structural integrity, weakens our integrity in that regard.

The other thing I was thinking about was maybe calibrate ourselves to God when we forgive and when we pray for the people that hurt us.

Sometimes they hurt us on purpose.

Very often it's by accident.

Um, we calibrate ourselves to God by doing that.

That's maybe what he's talking about, like the idea of perfect, getting away from perfect performance.

Just kind of like, and calibration is something like I'm thinking about like I know I've talked about this before at church, but it's been a while.

It's kind of like retuning an instrument.

You have to keep doing it.

And the more often you do it, the better the instrument holds its integrity.

Yeah.

I mean, that's really true for a piano.

If you wait too long to tune it, you can't tune it anymore.

Yeah.

It won't hold the pitch.

So those are the things I'm thinking about that gets me away from gotta get it right, don't make mistakes.

Yeah.

Okay.

So let's pray.

Father, thank you.

For all of these people, for the time that we get to spend together.

Would you be working in our hearts and digging out those places that we don't want to touch and we don't want to go to?

Would it be in your power, in your spirit, that we step into loving our enemies?

In your name we pray.

Amen.